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SOUTHERN STUMPIN’ By David Abbott • Managing Editor • Ph. 334-834-1170 • Fax: 334-834-4525 • E-mail: david@hattonbrown.com
Meet Pat Weiler he first time I saw Pat Weiler was at the MidSouth Show in Starkville, Miss. in September 2018. The President and CEO of Weiler, Inc., along with his Vice President, Bill Hood, were there to introduce their company to the logging industry, their future customers. They’d announced a month earlier that Weiler would be purchasing Caterpillar’s purpose-built forestry division, though the transaction would not be finalized for almost another year. I’ve hoped to get an interview with Pat Weiler ever since, but it never worked out. Then one afternoon in January, I get a call from Sean Doyle, forestry sales manager at Puckett Machinery in McComb, Miss. I’ve known Sean since I first started at Hatton-Brown 17 years ago; I met him on one of my first trips. He and his dad Pat had their own dealership here, DM Equipment, before they sold to Puckett in 2010. Even earlier, when I was a teenager in the ’90s, I had actually been to DM Equipment with my own dad when he considered buying a Prentice loader from Mr. Doyle for Abbott Logging Co. Sean has set me up with stories on several occasions over the years. On this day in January, he tells me he’ll be taking Mr. Weiler to see some customers for a few days. This is something, I understand, that Weiler and Hood both do frequently: meet personally with customers, find out what they want and how they can make a product better able to meet their needs. Sean tells me he thinks they’ll be able to make time to have a meal with me, if I’m able to fit it in my schedule. Without hesitation, I drive right on down to McComb. We meet at the Mallard, a restaurant just outside McComb, near Dixie Springs Lake. As I walk in, I hear Tom Petty in the background, singing about that last dance with Mary Jane. Introductions are made, hands shaken. I recognize quickly that Mr. Weiler, 65, seems to have many of the character qualities I admire: down to earth, modest, soft spoken; keenly observant and intelligent in his analysis of what he observes; focused on getting the job done as best as possible; eager to share credit with others. Our waitress approaches. She and Sean seem to be first-name familiar; he’s probably a regular, I surmise. After shrimp appetizers, Sean orders a burger. Mr. Weiler had ordered the filet, but changes his mind, opting for the burger as well. He’s decided to trust the judgment of a local guy familiar with the place, someone who knows what’s what from first-hand experience. That seems to be a pattern for Pat Weiler: listening to and learning from others.
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Background Pat Weiler, I learn, grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa, in a town called Remsen. After college at Iowa State, he went to work for Vermeer 6
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Pat Weiler
Corporation. In 2000, he left Vermeer to start a small company: Five Star Industries, based in Knoxville, Ia. Later, the decision was made to change the name to Weiler. It was just shop work at first, until they bought a paving product from Caterpillar, just a small piece of equipment for the paving industry, something that wasn’t really worth it for the big company to make. “Vermeer didn’t do anything in paving, so it gave me a chance to get into an industry without competing against my friends,” Weiler explains. “I thought over time we would learn what contractors in that industry needed and start developing product.” His approach to an industry in which he’d had no prior experience emphasized actively seeking customer input. “That’s the fun part,” Weiler insists. “Learning new stuff and listening to what people want. It’s really not that hard if you just listen to what people tell you they want and build it.”
Forestry Weiler and his team seem to be applying to our industry the same philosophy that was successful for them in paving. It’s the same mindset I observe from him at dinner: trusting those who know more than he does about a subject.
“We don’t run the equipment, so why would we build what we want?” he points out. “If you’re not gonna operate it yourself you better do what other people want to do. I find that works pretty good over time: try to do what people are asking you to do. It’s early on yet to tell if we’re succeeding, but I think if you look at the things we have changed and modified over the last two years, it shows what we are trying to do.” Even before Weiler took on forestry, the Cat dealers were already selling Weiler paving equipment. Given Weiler’s history with Cat, it makes sense that the dealer network was behind the offer in 2018. “We had a good relationship with the dealers,” Weiler tells me, “so they encouraged Cat to seek us out because of what we had done in the paving industry.” Sean was part of that process. “We had a meeting with Pat and Bill, and they basically said if this core group of dealers is not on board, we’re not interested in pursuing it. They had to get the buy-in up front, and the dealer principals were interested in doing that.” I’m curious how logging compares to when he took on paving. “With forestry, we were really lucky that we could do a lot of due diligence beforehand,” Weiler points out. “Pretty much everything we did with paving, we started ➤ 43
MARCH 2022 l Southern Loggin’ Times
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